by Frances
The uneasiness, the uncertainty, had gone from Carl Hunter’s manner. He seemed now quite sure of himself. Too sure, at least of the point he made. There was no telling, yet, what it had to do or did not have to do with what had happened.
For one thing, it was evident that Higgins’s locking of the service door, the automatic locking of the front door when Hunter went out of it—if he had, whenever he had—proved nothing one way or the other. Clearly, anyone—including a murderer—might get from one house to the other through the “laboratory.” As Faith Oldham just had.
“Miss Oldham,” Weigand said. “It is Miss Oldham?”
She looked at him, now, but as if she had returned from a long journey.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Miss.”
“Did Professor Elwell expect you this evening?”
“Expect—oh. There wasn’t anything definite. When—when I want to see him I come through the other room and knock and if he’s not busy—” She put her fingers to her curved, full lips. “That’s the way it—used to be,” she said, the low voice muffled.
“You come—?” Bill said, and his voice was almost as low as the girl’s.
“When—when I want to ask him something,” she said. “When I’m worried. He’s like—he was like—I don’t know. He knew so much. Was so—kind.”
A childlike quality persisted. Then, abruptly, it vanished.
“Who killed him?” she said, and her tone demanded. “Why would anybody kill him?”
“I don’t know,” Weigand said. “It only happened a few hours ago. Apparently, just after Mr. Hunter left him. Did he say anything about expecting someone, Mr. Hunter? Another student, perhaps?”
“Don’t you think I’d have told you if he had?” Hunter said. “No.”
“And you,” Weigand said. “You came to ask him something too, Mr. Hunter?”
“No,” Hunter said. “The other way around. This project—no use going into that. He was supervising it, of course. A lot of us are doing the spade work. I brought him some tabulations to check over. One of us—usually I was the one—brought him data two or three times a week.”
“Look,” Mullins said, “what did you say this project was about? Did you say cats, mister?”
Bill did not quite smile. It was so evident that Mullins hoped, hoped anxiously, that the project was not about cats. But Hunter and the girl merely looked, a little blankly, at the large sergeant.
“Why?” Hunter said. “Yes. It’s about cats. Their varying reactions to stimuli under—” He snapped his fingers. “Don’t start me on that,” he said. “Why?”
“Cats,” Mullins repeated. He spoke as a man whose worst fears have been confimed. Men broke clocks, young women came out of closets and now—cats. Omens.
“Another screwy one,” Sergeant Mullins said, as much to himself as to Captain William Weigand.
“They’re not in it,” Weigand said, gently.
“They will be,” Mullins told him. Mullins spoke from an abyss.
Hunter and Faith Oldham looked from one policeman to the other.
“This girl you were going to meet at the bookshop,” Weigand said to Hunter. “You said she was late?”
“Carl,” the girl said. “I—I told you. I couldn’t—”
“Never mind,” Hunter said, and smiled at the tall girl and there was, Bill thought, warmth and reassurance in his smile and—and more? There was no use guessing.
“How late were you, Miss Oldham?” Bill asked her.
“About twenty minutes,” she said. “It was supposed to be three o’clock and—Carl. Does it matter?”
“Jamey was killed a little after three, they say,” Carl Hunter told her. “If we’d been together at the bookshop—” He shrugged.
The tall girl turned on Weigand. Her face was not pale now. Her face was flushed. She was quite a different person now from the tall, uneasy girl who had walked into the room and stopped, abashed.
“You’re not crazy enough to think Carl—Carl knows anything about this,” she said. “Nobody could be that—”
“Wait,” Bill said. “Mr. Hunter’s ahead of us. He was here this afternoon. Of course we have to find out what we can about when he left. And—”
She did not wait.
“What you’re saying,” she said, “is that he needs an alibi. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
Her tone accused.
“I—” Weigand began, but was interrupted. Sergeant Mullins had returned.
“Lady,” Sergeant Mullins said, and spoke to a child. “A good alibi never hurt anybody. Whether he needs it or don’t need it.”
“For the record,” Hunter said, “I didn’t kill Professor Jameson Elwell.”
“Right,” Bill said. “Now—about this laboratory. Let’s have a look at it.”
He led them into it, pausing long enough to confirm the obvious—that the door into the office, from the “closet” which was only incidentally a closet, could be locked against entrance from the office, but not against entrance to the office. Which seemed at first a little odd, but did not a moment later. To get into the “laboratory” from the other house one needed a key. Weigand opened that door, looked at the top of a flight of stairs and closed the door again.
“You have a key, of course,” he told Faith Oldham. “Anybody else you know of? Your mother?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know about anybody else. Uncle Jamey gave me a key so I could—if I needed to talk to him I mean—come this way instead of going outside and up through the other house and—” She stopped. “I don’t know about any other keys,” she said.
“The door downstairs,” Bill said. “The front door. Of this house. It’s kept locked, of course?”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t—oh, you mean somebody could have got in through our house? I don’t mean ours, really—it was his house. Mother and I just—rent the lower floors. That’s what you mean?”
“Yes,” Bill said. “If somebody had a key to the front door, another key to this door”—he pointed—“he could come up without you or your mother seeing him? Or—hearing him?”
How, she wanted to know, could she answer that? It depended on where they were in the house. On whether they were in the house at all. This afternoon, for example—this afternoon she had left the house at about three to meet Hunter at the bookshop. Her mother had been there at the time, but had been dressed to go out, ready to go out. When she had actually gone only she could tell them. “But she’s not home now,” Faith Oldham said. “This is her bridge night.”
“Servants?”
She smiled at that, smiled faintly. “Not for a long time,” Faith Oldham said. “Not for years and years. You see, daddy—” She stopped. She shook her head, as if at herself. “Look,” she said. “I told you we rented our part of the house. We—well, we don’t. Uncle Jamey just lets—just let—us live there. Because he and daddy—Anyway, that’s the way it is. And—that’s the way he—was.”
It had taken effort, Bill Weigand thought. It had taken honesty.
“After you two met,” he said. “At the bookshop. At around twenty minutes after three—” He waited a moment. Hunter nodded his head and the nod said, All right so far.
He had moved a little closer to the girl.
“What did you do the rest of the afternoon?”
“I don’t see—” Hunter said and looked with raised eyebrows at Bill Weigand, who did not precisely see either, except that one does not press always at a single spot. “Went to a lecture—lecture on contemporary drama—at the Hartley Theater. That’s part of the university, you know.” He seemed to doubt Weigand did. “Right,” Bill said.
“Lasted an hour and a half,” Carl Hunter said. “Or thereabouts. Beginning at four. Then—well, we walked around for a while and talked for a while, and went to a place and had a drink and then—well, then, Faith had to go home. And I went back to watch the cats.”
He looked at Mullins when he said that. Mullins did not look at h
im.
Faith Oldham had come home; she had “helped” with the dinner. Her mother had been home then. At about eight her mother had gone toward bridge. Faith had washed up, and read a while and then—
“There was something I wanted to ask Uncle Jamey,” she said and then covered her face again and her thin shoulders began to shake. And Carl Hunter went to her and put an arm around her shoulders, and held her.
“Listen,” he said, “that’s all we know.”
“Right,” Bill said, not knowing whether it was right or not, but only that there are times to press and times to give. “If anything else comes up—”
Which let them go. They went, together, toward the door. “By the way,” Bill said, as they neared it, “I think I’d better take the key, Miss Oldham. You won’t have any more use for it. And we like—”
She brought the key back to him. She did not say anything.
“So?” Hunter said.
“Good night,” Bill said. “We’ll know where to find you, if we need to.”
As, he thought, when the door closed behind them—the girl was almost as tall as Hunter—they probably would.
“Why laboratory?” Mullins said, as they looked around the room. “No test tubes.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Now that’s something,” he said. “Acoustic ceiling. And the curtains and carpet and all.”
Bill nodded. A room built for silence, for concentration. And, certainly, with no test tubes. A laboratory of the mind, if one at all.
A desk, not as large as the one in the office. A leather couch with a table beside it and, on the table, a tape recorder. A chair beside the couch. Across the room, a table phonograph. At the end of the room most distant from the windows, two doors. Bill indicated them with his head and Mullins opened one, which led to a bathroom. He opened the other, which opened on a corridor. Mullins went down the corridor and, almost at once, returned.
“One other room,” he said. “Just used it as a storeroom, from the looks of things. Loot, this is a screwy one.”
“That record’s stuck, sergeant,” Bill said, and grinned at Mullins who said, “Maybe. But all the same—”
“Speaking of records,” Bill said, “we’ll want to take that along.” He indicated the recorder.
“Sure,” Mullins said. “We run the tape and somebody says, ‘My name is Joseph Q. Zilch. I am now gonna kill you, professor, on account of’ and then, pretty soon, bang! And we go out and arrest Zilch and he says, ‘You got me, pals.’ Only, do we ever get nice simple ones, Loot?”
“No,” Bill said. “Does anybody?”
He was abstracted. He looked around the room again. He had, he thought, seldom seen two less communicative rooms than the office and the laboratory of the late Professor Elwell. He went over and looked at the record player and found a record on it. Mullins stood and watched him. Bill set the turntable revolving and the stylus arm rose obediently, hesitated, settled.
“Please listen carefully to what I say,” a man’s voice said. The voice was low, the words spoken slowly; the voice soothed. There was a momentary pause. “That’s right,” the voice said. “That is precisely right. Now this is what I would like you to do. This is what I would like you to do. Stand easily—that is right. Relax. That is right. Close your eyes, now. Close your eyes. Close your eyes.”
The voice was infinitely soothing. There was soft assurance in the low male voice.
“Now,” the voice said, “you will begin to feel yourself falling slowly forward—forward—you are falling slowly forward—forward—forward. You are beginning to lose your balance—something is pulling you slowly—slowly—slowly—forward. You are falling slowly forward. But do not try to resist—you cannot resist—you are falling forward—forward—there is nothing to be afraid of—I will catch you—you are falling forward, slowly forward—an irresistible force is slowly pulling you forward—you cannot help yourself but I will not let you fall—I will catch you—forward—forward you are falling slowly—falling—falling—”
It was soothing, relaxing. It was as, when one has taken a sleeping pill, gradually, tenderly, sleep creeps—creeps—
“The hell with this,” Bill Weigand thought, with something like anger, and opened his eyes—and was startled because he could not remember having closed his eyes.
“Forward,” the soft voice said. “Forward. You are falling slowly forward—you cannot—”
The hell I can’t, Bill Weigand thought, now with clear anger. And looked at Sergeant Mullins.
Sergeant Mullins, eyes closed as directed, heels together, arms hanging loosely, was standing in the middle of the room. And Sergeant Mullins was swaying slowly, contentedly, forward and back, forward and back; nodding like the mast of a sailboat in a gently rolling sea.
It was ludicrous. It was also, in some odd fashion, disturbing, even alarming.
Weigand lifted the player arm and the voice stopped. Mullins stopped swaying. He did not, however, open his eyes.
“Mullins!” Bill Weigand said, sharply.
Mullins opened his eyes.
“What kind of record is that?” Mullins said. “Damnedest thing I ever heard.”
“Yes,” Bill said. “It is an odd sort of record.”
“All this stuff about falling,” Mullins said. “Who’s going to pay any attention to that? If this professor thought anybody was going to think he was falling forward, forward, forward like it said, then the professor was nuts.”
Bill Weigand looked at Sergeant Mullins for a moment with speculation. Then he said, “Right, sergeant. Very silly business,” and took the record off the player and examined it. It had no title. It was scored only on one side. He would, Bill decided, have to take advice about the record on Professor Elwell’s turntable.
It was, among other things, interesting that Sergeant Mullins apparently had no realization whatever that he had obeyed the reiterated injunction and stood swaying gently, but always, it appeared, with the assurance that he would be caught, in the middle of a room built for silence.
It was unfortunate that Professor Jameson Elwell was dead, and so could not tell them what it was all about. He would have to ask somebody else. That, perhaps, was the next step.
Technicians worked in Professor Elwell’s laboratory, collected its dust and its fingerprints, took its picture and measured its walls. Mullins and precinct men and a detective assigned to the district attorney’s Homicide Bureau, listened to the tape from the recorder—listened to it from end to end, and heard only the faint scratching of a blank tape. (Not, then, a nice simple one, as Mullins had supposed it would not be.)
Then Mullins, with precinct aid, began the long, necessary chore of checking back on those they already knew about—on Mrs. Oldham and daughter, Faith; on Carl Hunter, graduate student obscurely concerned with cats; on such others as might appear. One of the others—Foster Elwell, brother of deceased—ought soon to appear, unless he was walking in from Westport. He would be asked to await the return of Captain Weigand.
Bill Weigand, meanwhile, had driven twenty blocks to the north, and found Dr. Eugene Wahmsley, dean of faculty, Dyckman University, waiting for him in the Men’s Faculty Club, as promised on the telephone. Dr. Wahmsley was a tanned man in his fifties, who looked as if he might play a good deal of golf. He got up from a deep leather chair and shook hands and said it was a shocking thing about poor Jamey and added that his loss would be felt.
“A great man in his field,” Dr. Wahmsley said, and although what he said was obvious he said it as if he meant it. He motioned Weigand to a chair, sat again in his own. A silver coffee pot stood on a table by his chair, beside an empty coffee cup and a half-empty pony glass of brandy. Dr. Wahmsley lifted the coffee pot and shook it and then shook his head, and then gestured. A man in a waiter’s jacket appeared. Dr. Wahmsley looked at the coffee pot with reproach.
“More coffee,” he said. “And a Courvoisier for my guest.”
“I—” Bill said.
“And tell them to make sur
e it’s fresh coffee,” Dr. Wahmsley said, with some sternness. “Yes, captain?”
“Nothing,” Bill said. Coffee and brandy seemed, on second thought, an excellent idea.
“You want to know about Jamey,” Wahmsley told him. “I gather it wasn’t some ordinary thing? Interrupted robbery, some young hood—that sort of thing?”
“It doesn’t seem so,” Bill told him, and told him what he needed to know—which was about as much as Bill knew himself—about the manner of Jameson Elwell’s death. Wahmsley said that it was hard to believe. Bill told him that murder always was.
“A bit of psychologist yourself, I gather,” Wahmsley said, and thanked the waiter for more coffee and watched it poured. “I said Jamey was a great man in his field,” Wahmsley said then. “What one always says, of course. About him, it happens to be true. You know anything about his work?”
“No,” Bill said. “Oh, that he was professor of psychology, that he was supervising some sort of an experiment which involved cats—that he had a room in his house—the house next door, actually, but I gather he owned it—that he called a laboratory. In brief—nothing of importance about his work.” He sipped. “Or at the moment,” he added, “about any part of him.”
“Animal intelligence,” Wahmsley said. “That explains the cats. We feel here that he carried on—a long distance on—from where Thorndike and the rest left off.” He looked at Weigand with sudden doubt. “Edward Lee Thorndike?” he said.
“I’ve heard of Thorndike,” Bill said, with no special inflection. “I went to Columbia for a time.”
“Good school,” Wahmsley said. “Very good school. Well—that explains the cats. Also, a number of dogs and even more rats and quite a few monkeys.”
He poured himself more coffee.
“A great researcher in his field,” Wahmsley said, and seemed to speak to the silver coffee pot, and spoke slowly. “A great teacher. And—more than that.” He looked at Weigand now. “A very special sort of man,” he said. “Aside from all that. It is—to be honest, captain, it seems flatly impossible that anybody would kill a man like Elwell. Anybody in his right mind. Or what passes for lightness of mind nowadays.”
